The Confederate Revolution

The Confederate rebellion can be viewed as a revolutionary attempt at regional secession from the Union with the objective of establishing an independent state. I would hesitate to say “white ethnostate,” because I don’t think it was that.

Yet nationalism scholars barely notice the Confederate States of America. There are a variety of reasons for this: Southern secession failed, the Confederacy was short-lived, Confederates were conservative rather than Leftist, and academics are reluctant to view a slave-based society in nationalist or revolutionary terms.

The pertinent legal issue is: Was secession constitutional? If so, then, theoretically, secession was not revolutionary, but a valid assertion of legal rights.

But, as a practical matter, it must be viewed as revolutionary.

The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience

Forty years ago Emory M. Thomas, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, analyzed the Confederacy from this perspective.

His 150-page essay on the subject was published as The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1971).

The Confederates, Thomas maintained, were conservative revolutionaries in the tradition of their American revolutionary predecessors. Through an “external revolution” they established a new nation, the Confederate States of America.

“But revolutions, even conservative revolutions, contain a dynamic of their own. They have a way of getting out of hand and transforming even institutions they were meant to preserve.” (p. 1)

So, unintentionally, Confederate leaders ushered in a second, “internal” revolution at odds with pre-war Southern society and many of the secessionists’ own aims. This accidental revolution was propelled by the demands of total war.

Professor Thomas has also written a comprehensive history of Confederate nationalism called The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (1979). In 2005 a Festschrift edited by Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe, Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, was published.

Thomas also penned biographies of J. E. B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee. An hour-long 1995 television interview with Thomas from C-SPAN’s Booknotes about the Lee biography and Thomas’s own background can be viewed online. A transcript of the interview is also available.

The South’s revolutionary experience is worth examining because it holds valuable lessons for white nationalists. Thomas’s view of the experience is outlined in what follows.

The Old South

The most salient features of the pre-war “quintessential South” were states’ rights, agrarianism, racial slavery, aristocracy, and specific habits of mind.

In their postwar memoirs, both Jefferson Davis and Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens maintained that states’ rights were the essential issue underlying the conflict.

States’ rights is the political doctrine that strictly limits the prerogatives of the federal government to powers explicitly assigned to it by the US Constitution, while reserving to the several states all remaining powers not explicitly forbidden them.

The legal concept originated with Thomas Jefferson in 1798, and was elaborated in succeeding decades by John Taylor of Caroline, John Randolph of Roanoke, and Southern statesman John C. Calhoun.

Agrarianism signified an agricultural society, economy, and way of life neither communal nor wholly capitalistic.

Slavery was a third vital feature of the South.

Pierre Brissaud, “Picnic in the Old South,” 1934

Emory Thomas quotes Virginian Thomas Jefferson’s racial belief as representative: “I advance it . . . as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

Thomas notes that moderate abolitionists, despite their desire to abolish the legal ownership of human beings, did not accept black-white racial equality.

This observation is in accord with the Nation of Islam’s statement that “white abolitionists who earnestly wanted an end to slavery had no intention of granting the Black man full social, economic, or political citizenship. They decried the horrors of that cruelest of institutions, but most [emphasis added] fundamentally believed in the rightness of white mastery over all affairs of the nation.” (The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2, 2010, p. 28)

As further evidence, many founders and leaders (including Quakers) of the American Colonization Society, whose goal was to repatriate blacks to Africa, were abolitionists. “Incorruptibles” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown were rare.

Thomas writes that “the great majority of antebellum Southerners did not own slaves.”

The Secret Relationship, written by black nationalist scholars, is more explicit than Thomas. Referring to the US as a whole, the book says that prior to the Civil War roughly 7% of white Americans owned slaves, while 93% did not. (p. 54) In the South, Jews were twice as likely to own slaves as the average white Southerner. (p. 23)

A few Southern dissidents opposed slavery on the grounds that it was harmful to whites. One such dissident was Hinton Rowan Helper.

In The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), dedicated to “nonslaveholding whites” (mostly Scotch Irish and English Americans), he demonstrated that slavery and the plantation system held back the entire region, as well as white non-slaveholders as a class.

Another radical Southerner, James DeBow, Superintendent of the US Census and publisher of the commercial monthly DeBow’s Review, soundly urged Southerners to diversify their economy, build railroads and factories, and become economically self-sufficient and prosperous as a practical extension of Southern nationalism.

Nevertheless, Southern non-slaveholders supported slavery for reasons of race, kinship (in some cases), and economic ties to the plantation system. Helper’s critique of slavery, dubbed “Helperism,” was roundly condemned throughout the South. The majority of Southerners did not seriously question the planter-dominated social structure.

As slavery came under increasing attack, the Southern position hardened. What had once been a “necessary evil” became a “positive good.” With striking unanimity Southern elites—slaveholders, press, pulpit, schools, and politicians—closed ranks on the issue.

Aristocracy “in a qualified sense” was another Southern hallmark. Planters constituted a stylized landed gentry that locally produced a single staple commodity—cotton, tobacco, sugar, or rice.

The plantation ideal and the lifestyle of country gentlemen fostered a planter aristocracy that united white Southerners of all classes, who were psychologically and economically part of it.

For the most part, the Southern aristocracy was not based upon old money and distinguished family lineages. From colonial times until the eve of secession, Southern aristocracy remained fluid: individual members came and went, though the class itself endured. New whites rose into it as former aristocrats dropped out.

Land and slaves afforded financial, social, and political eminence to the minority of whites who owned them in quantity. Because planter interests were politically dominant, the Confederacy became an expression of those interests.

One serious deficiency of Thomas’s account is his failure to explain how late a development the full-blown American plantation-slave economy actually was. It only developed in the first half of the 19th century.

Finally, Southerners shared unique “habits of mind,” one of which was provincialism. Another, surprising one, according to native Southerner Thomas, was individualism:

Individualism was a strong characteristic of the Southern mind. The rural and near-frontier conditions of Southern life usually precluded a feeling of corporate identity. The Southerner often lived or could remember himself living in rural isolation, commanding the destiny of himself, his family, and his chattels. If he was a slaveholder, he felt himself to be absolute master of a rural empire, and this feeling fed the assertion of self. (p. 17)

Southern individualism was reflected in decentralization, states’ rights, localism, agrarianism, laissez-faire, and private ownership of land and commercial enterprises. “Bureaucrats [were] scarce in the antebellum South, which adhered to the maxim ‘the government which governs least governs best.'” (p. 70)

Other features of the Southern mind were evangelical Protestantism, romanticism, chivalry, codes of honor, manners, reverence for womanhood, oratory, and dueling.

The South was a conscious minority long before 1860, and remained one long after.

Florida’s Ordinance of Secession, January 10, 1861

The Fire-Eaters

The “conservative revolution’s” classic revolutionaries, the men who agitated for secession and war (if necessary) to create a Southern nation, are called fire-eaters or radicals by historians. They appeared from the 1820s on, and over the course of the ensuing 40 years made secession a popular and respectable cause.

The revolutionaries employed “radical means to achieve conservative ends . . . Their goal was reactionary—to preserve the Southern way of life.” But in pursuit of that goal, they “acted in ways commonly associated with revolutionaries.” (p. 24)

Among the leading Southern radicals were Edmund Ruffin (publisher of a journal promoting scientific farming), Robert Barnwell Rhett (“Father of Secession,” an attorney, state legislator, state attorney general, US Congressman and Senator), and William Lowndes Yancey (attorney, state legislator, and US congressman).

As a “mid-sixty-year-old revolutionary,” Edmund Ruffin fired the first cannon at Fort Sumter.

Of William Lowndes Yancey one source states, “As extreme a ‘fire-eater’ as William Lloyd Garrison was an abolitionist, he even advocated the reopening of the African slave trade. The whole separatist movement was due more to him than to any one Southerner.”

Before the war Yancey envisioned a policy of secession by a “considerable number” of unspecified Deep South states, with Virginia and other sympathetic border states staying within the Union. By virtue of their positions and councils they would moderate and counter Union demands and serve as political and geographic buffers for the new nation, avoiding a long, hostile, politically abolitionist border. Once the new regime was firmly established,border states desiring to do so could join the Confederacy under the protection of its arms and diplomacy.

Although Yancey’s vision did not materialize, it illustrates the detailed, practical thought revolutionaries gave to their cause. Like 18th century American or 20th century German revolutionaries, they were serious about political change—they really intended their ideas to alter the existing social order.

Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851), a prominent lawyer and judge (not to be confused with his eminent nephew of the same name), was unusual for a Southerner in that he belonged to a social aristocratic family whose members were prominent in law, the judiciary, politics, and diplomacy from the time of the American Revolution to the 1930s.

Tucker wrote a revolutionary novel, The Partisan Leader (1836), envisioning a future Virginia ruled with an iron hand by Northern functionaries while, to the south, a new Confederacy basked in the sunshine of prosperity and freedom. The book was a forerunner of contemporary revolutionary fiction by William Pierce and Harold Covington.

Mirabeau B. Lamar had served as president of the Republic of Texas, and David Yulee, America’s first Jewish US Senator (D.-Fla.), was a large slaveholder, sugar plantation proprietor, and president of the Florida Railroad Co.

Henry A. Wise, an attorney, US congressman, ambassador to Brazil, and governor of Virginia, controlled the Richmond Enquirer newspaper. He earned the sobriquet “Danton of the Secession Movement in Virginia” for his efforts on behalf of disunion.

The fire-eaters also included prominent Presbyterian clergymen, newspaper editors, state governors, and US congressmen and senators.

Thus, even the most radical Southerners included many highly placed individuals—members of the elite.

This pattern is true of every revolution. There comes a time when radical dissent needs to extend to elite individuals and institutions on a significant scale. It was true of the Dutch Revolution, the American Revolution, and the German Revolution of 1933.

On the other side, it was also true of the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the Communist revolutions, and the cultural “revolutions within the form” characteristic of the New Deal (see Garet Garrett, “The Revolution Was,” 1938), post-WWII totalitarian “democracy,” and the 1970s.

South Carolina, 1860: “The Union is Dissolved!”

Revolution and the Climate of Ideas

The fire-eaters propagated secessionist ideas via “their own communications media”—speeches, church sermons, books, pamphlets, and mainstream newspapers and journals including the Southern Literary Messenger once edited by Edgar Allan Poe, and the Southern Quarterly Review.

Many newspapers—the main mass medium of the day—promoted the cause of secession. The equivalent in our time would be mainstream broadcast and cable TV stations, channels, and programs, and mainstream novels, movies, video games, pop music, etc., promoting the cause of white rights, independence, and separatism.

Throughout the South newspaper editors took up radicalism and radicals became editors. By 1860 Southern newspapers were divided about evenly between radical secessionist and moderate states’ rights papers. Few Union newspapers survived.

Gradually, Southern nationalists came to dominate the press, pulpit, and classroom.

“Super-Southerners,” Thomas writes, “banned books, smashed presses, and harried malcontents from the land”—an “intellectual blockade” documented in Clement Eaton’s The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (rev. ed., 1964).

Of course, the same process occurred in reverse in the North. And far, far worse intellectual suppression prevails today.

Contemporary whites have woefully failed to examine, much less cope with, prevailing mechanisms of repression, thought control, mass psychological conditioning, and social marginalization and destruction of recalcitrant individuals.

They have not treated seriously the unseen culture-distorting activities of Jews, the mass media, academia, the ADL, the SPLC, or the FBI. Yet these are what have prevented any effective, anti-genocidal opposition from arising that would certainly have developed in the past.

This climate of ideas must absolutely change. Until the “quarantining” and marginalization of white ideas is effectively beaten back or eradicated, no progress will be possible, and genocide will proceed apace.

Racial totalitarianism such as this is unique to the modern era. If past revolutionaries of any stripe had had to contend with similar obstacles, their ideas would never have gained currency. They would have died aborning, just as ours have.

The closest historical analogy is Communism. Its many opponents and victims throughout the world, through no fault of their own, were helpless in the face of repression due to disparity of power, technology, will, state lawlessness, psychological and social control, and, frankly, pure evil.

Triumph of the Moderates

Southern radicals did not just preach revolution in the abstract. Thomas is careful to note, however, that a climate of opinion sympathetic to disunion was necessary: the social tinder had to be ready for the revolutionary spark.

In conscious imitation of Samuel Adams and other Founders of the 1770s, the radicals formed Southern Rights Associations, the League of United Southerners, and Minute Men organizations.

William Lowndes Yancey in 1858 proposed forming Committees of Public Safety throughout the South “as our fathers did,” in order to instruct the Southern mind and fire the Southern heart. Then, at the proper moment, “by one concerted action,” they could precipitate the Southern states into rebellion.

But it was Robert Barnwell Rhett’s blueprint that became a reality almost to the letter. Despairing of concerted action, he proposed instead that a single state, South Carolina, should secede, presenting a fait accompli. Then other states would follow suit, and Southern union would result.

In fact, the Southern states seceded in two waves: the first in response to the election of Lincoln and the secession of South Carolina, the second in response to the clash at Fort Sumter.

Curiously, the Confederate Constitution established a “permanent” union, thus in a sense denying the logic of its own origin. Moreover, the Northern case against the Confederacy was that the US Constitution itself had established a permanent union.

In an interesting twist, in 1861, following Virginia’s secession from the Union, the western counties of that state held their own convention, seceded from Virginia, and by popular referendum created a new state (West Virginia), which was admitted to the Union in 1863.

I’ve read some debates from West Virginia’s secessionist convention, and certain delegates cited the Dutch Revolution as a precedent.

Ironically, radicals did not exert significant influence over the Confederacy after its formation. Few fire-eaters served long or prominently in the new republic they labored so hard to create.

Instead, they were shunted aside by civilian and military moderates: Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, Jewish Secretary of War and Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin (a large slaveholder and plantation owner), Robert E. Lee, and others.

Although the founding of the Confederacy was a radical act, the convention that performed this act was not radical in nature. The principal objective was to establish a government that would preserve and perpetuate the political, social, and economic conditions which represented the Southern way of life in 1861. (Charles R. Lee, Jr., The Confederate Constitutions, 1963, p. 49)

These moderates did, however, deliberately create an “instant nation.”

The Confederate Constitution was essentially the US Constitution as amended and construed by Southerners.

The irony, Emory Thomas notes, is that the moderate statesmen who conducted war and statecraft on behalf of the Confederate nation responded to the demands of total warfare, limited finances, and the lack of an industrial base by creating

a real, substantive revolution within Southern society. This internal revolution ultimately transformed the Southern way of life. Thus, the Confederate revolution, initiated by radicals to preserve the antebellum status quo, changed to conservative hands and then revolutionized that status quo. (p. 42)

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15 Comments

As a Southerner who lives among a forest of historical markers commemorating the brave and noble Union troops that defeated the dastardly Rebels, I can’t tell you how much this series means to me. I know there are secessionists out there today but I don’t pay them much attention. Instead, I’m fully inspired by this measured discussion of what the CSA really was.

Regardless of my personal history, there is no question that “The South” is impossible to celebrate in the urban south. Even for my father, I think it is an abstraction, only given value in racialist terms. Instead, what we have here is a clear explanation of who these people were and what they were doing – it takes the utopia out of it, let’s say.

Also, with Covington promoting the NW as homeland, I wonder if the history of The South has been marginalized for White Nationalists – even for me, I look to Europe, Italy, and Japan for theoretical and conceptual inspiration, never thinking about the Southern Counter-Enlightenment. I guess it makes sense, though, considering that I wear fascist and white power shirts all over Atlanta, and no one ever says a word (the WP shirts are quite clever and obscure); yet I know that if I wear a Confederate battle flag shirt I’ll most likely have to fight my way home.

This is one reason I’m dying to move to the rural south. In Rome, GA’s cemetery there is a lovely and huge CSA monument, which, when paired with the fasces on the Lupa Capitolina (a gift of the Duce), most likely make it the only city in the world with a monument to both the CSA and fascism. And then, one returns to Atlanta – a city that already got what it deserved – to the land of SUVs, bourgeois white folk, Mexicans, and black folk, and feels thoroughly disconnected from any noble history that might have happened on the very ground upon which one walks. I hope these essays at least make us have to come to terms with the CSA. In this new south, that would be saying a lot.

The inscription on the mounment in Rome, Ga., is vivid, and frightening when you see just how many White girls in rural Georgia are now mongrel breeding squaws for black voodoo Diversity gang bangers. The great great great great grandaughters of those Confederates heroes are wiping out the White bloodlines. It’s hard to care about the future when you see how the White race has decided to kill itself.

CSA, Myrtle Hill Cemetery:

Erected by the women of Rome to the memory of the soldiers of Floyd County, Ga. who died in defense of the Confederate States of America.

This monument is the testimony of the present to the future that these were they who kept the faith as it was given to them by their fathers. Be it known by this token that these men were true to the tradition of their lineage. Bold, generous and free, firm in conviction of the right. Ready at their country’s call. Steadfast in their duty, faithful ever in despair; and illustrated in the unflinching heroism of their deaths the free born courage of their lives.

They crossed the river and sleep beneath the shade.

How well they served their faith. Their people know; a thousand battlefields attest; dungeon and hospital bear witness to their sons they left but honor and the country. Let this stone forever warm those who keep their valleys that only their sires are dead the principles for which they fought can never die.

Oh I see what you are saying: Jews are thin on the ground and the B Team is large and always a threat to them. But they can’t do anything to them because they need them. So in the Soviet Union, WW2 put a severe strain on the system and Whites gained ground during those years because of that. Perhaps that could happen here?

Well maybe. But they’ve evolved a system here that the old Soviets could only dream of. The System still has far more credibility than it did in the Soviet Union.

Mel Gibson is a very gifted but very tormented man. Not sure he’s up for anything as radical as White Nationalism. He gave out an award at the Emmys a couple of years ago after he had broken with Traditional Catholicism and shacked up with a Hollywood Bimbo who then ditched him and ran off with their kid. Hollywood accepted him a bit then though they will never forget. But he’s a big money maker and that always opens doors.

The other week Rush Limbaugh mentioned “Pat” with reverence – the kind reserved for people who are on the shelf. He has no intention of ever debating his ideas about Trade, Immigration, and the Elite since they differ so much from Buchanan’s.

Some more moderate whites recognize the genocide plan for whites and work to halt it. However many of them seem at the same time to be acting to defuse any white conscious raising that is not “safe.” They fear any effective pro-white political organizing that is not run by “moderates.” They fear any revolutionary awakening of whites that could spin out of control and end in a serious civil/racial war.
They also fear economic decline stemming from government and consumer over spending and off shoring could lead to collapse and thence to a serious civil war.
These barely racially conscious although moderate whites recognize that the politicians are “kicking the can down the road” when it comes to constraining government borrowing.
The moderates fully realize that the politicians can’t stand the near term pain that would come from fiscal responsibility, and are thus setting up conditions for far worse economic troubles the longer the politicians keep kicking the can.
What the moderates can’t see is that they also are “kicking a can down the road” when it comes to disallowing normal white political resistance to genocide to develop freely.
Moderates seem to want white’s to forever abstain from violent revolt even if it means whites eventually will end up as 45% of the population or lower.
My gut feeling is that if whites don’t revolt before then they will be forced to by the outrages perpetrated against them by the then majority.
So in disallowing serious white resistance to mobilize it’self now the moderates are likely just putting off a civil war from five years ahead to 30. They can’t stand the near term pain of a possible civil war now.
If a civil war begins in five years whites will be close to 60% of the population, would win and the war would be short and relatively less bloody. And everybody would then realize that, in Tom Chittums phrase diversity was “psycodelic fiction from the 60’s.”
If the weak kneed moderates manage to sabotage serious white resistance for thirty more years though whites would likely be only 45% of the population. Then the civil war would either be much longer and bloodier with the whites winning, or much bloodier and longer with the whites losing.
In reality it may be the politicians who will end up doing us a favor by bringing on collapse and civil war much sooner, and the moderates are actually working in a way that would lead to a much bloodier conflagration. Not to mention the possibility of a final solution to the “white problem.”
Maybe the moderates know that once they stop sabotaging uncontrolled white awakening it will mushroom to civil war overnight. That would give the moderates an “eject” button to push if their plan of gradually awakening whites turns out to take too long, but I wonder. I think it’s just the cowardice typical of a committee. I hope I’m wrong.
But it is also likely that as conditions worsen the moderates will become less moderate over time, and then they too will be all for “revolution now.”
But meanwhile, what ever the truth about moderates is, let’s keep talking to the white majority, not just to each other, not just to the choir.

Who are these moderates who know but fear to act? Can you name any names? Pat Buchanon? He’s sidelined now. Anybody with any real clout? There are guys like Chuck Baldwin and Rush Limbaugh who know Whites are being persecuted but they think we can all just get along once the Liberals are defeated. They don’t seem very moderate to me. They are aghast at the very idea of White Nationalism I believe.

Buchanan is not a moderaict. He’s written of the likelyhood of a come back for the Guilloten.
I have some hints.
Mel Gibson could be one, but maybe that’s wishful thinking on my prat as he could bankroll the white dissident movement with more money than we’ve ever dreamed up.
But you have to admitt movies of his like “Patriot” and “Brave Heart” are revolutionary.j
In “Brave Heart” the evil Englis baron gets knocked on his ass whilte wearing what is clearly a take off on the American flag. He is wear bright blue spandex type pantw that are the hue of the filed on the U.S. flag. More blatantly his cape is made up of red and white strips exactly like the rest of the U.S. flag.
I am tired of hearing us belly ache about all our traitorous white, money grubing elites.
It stands to reason SOME of them will have civic consciouses. Ted Turner, although not in any way favorable to our camp, gave $1 billion to the U.N. There must be a few white elites in the pro-white dissident camp that are worth a couple of hundred million.
I’m more familiar with what I see in media and alternative politics like Buchanan, Gibson and Ron Paul. I suspect a lot of Paul’s money came from seruptitious deep pockets.
Beside media and politics, there would surely be some deep pockets in industry. Who for instance knows of the top of their head who the presisden of Johnson & Johnson is?
Not to mention the second tier corporate officers who probably bring down four or five million a year.
Before I’ve talked about a lose knit group and referred to them as Rational Elites. The moderates I spoke of above would the the moderates in that group.
I’ve said before I consider Gibson is likely an RE. I’d thin Buchanan would be.
There are smart people or they wouldn’t be in the positions they hold. As such they are going to be cagy.
I’m also seeing pro-white TV commercials the last few years, like “The Messenger” white male character in the Progressive Insurance add campaign.
The most effective thing they can do for now is disseminate pro-white propaganda as in the commercials mentioned above.
They undoubtably don’t know each other, other than a few members of their own “cell”.
They would be connected by their usual cockatail circuit and social groups. There would likely be EAst and West coast groups, with people like Buchanan and Gibson. both Catholic conservatives, but who, if they are “in” don’t met and probably don’t know the other is a member of he “underground.”
Gott run. Hope that give you food for thought.

My main point about white Rational Elites is that at a minimum they will preserve our political rights and right of free association. All the gloom and doom, particularly in the Northwest movement is over done. Five years ago I didn’t think that.
I do feel Covington is right in recommending we mass in the Northwest for concentrated local political firepower. I used to believe he was right in that that would force the empire elites to unconstitutionally crack down on us and create justification for secession.

Now I don’t think that crack down would come. So perhaps if we take over the Northwest we should just count on employing the American tradition of nullification of unconstitutional anti-white genocide laws.
And if you can’t or won’t move to the Northwest consider at least moving to a rural county along with a significant number of other pro-white dissidents. Then you could elect a constitutional Sheriff like Arapio or Mac in Arizona.
In light of the fact that the Rational Elites will preserve our basic political freedom we should:

1. Continue talking to unawake whites (I just posted several pro-white comments on sodahead.com this week.)

2. Gather in small communities where we can socially support each other (how many of you have been to national pro-white meetings and enjoyed the relief of being among ideological fellows?)
Elect pro-white Sheriffs and county officials. (I’ve been targeted with entrapment by our local Democrat Sheriff I’m sure.)

3. Implement security screening for community membership. No half-Jews or suspected fed operatives.

I viewed an exchange on FOX some months ago between Hannity and Buchanan. Pat was openly bemoaning the decline of whites, white power, the white birthrate, and how non-whites vote as blocs to steer elections their way. A fundamental talking point of PB was that the Republican Party has committed a kind of suicide because for the past half century it has done NOTHING about illegal immigration (as in: the newcomers are non-whites who vote DP).

Hannity sidestepped that all-important point by suggesting that blacks, browns, etc. will or could become ‘conservatives’ voting for the RP. Therefore all is not lost, there is hope. Hope for what? A racially amalgamated mud-colored population with republicans in power forever, or something like that. The goal being to just get republicans in office, period.

That’s kind of how these kinds think. Racial identity is a non-starter, a career-buster. Rush Limbaugh frequently skates very close to ‘racist’ talk but there are lines he won’t cross when it comes to telling the truth, or put another way: truths he won’t tell. He knows Romney is just a liberal who will do nothing for us, but he’s fallen into line supporting him. They all do that.

O’Reilly is another fool; he pretends to not even be a conservative and rips and tears at anyone telling racial truths. I remember him having David Duke on his program some years ago. He was incredibly, aggressively nasty and rude to him, making it very plain that any kind of race-reality was utterly taboo.

It is kind of amazing that virtually every news story, event, or trend that is talked about on the tube is actually a RACIAL story at its root, but nobody ever points this out. They won’t go near it. They won’t touch it. It seems to be a consensus for ‘conservatives’ to be absolutely non-racial and only mildly / blandly ‘conservative’ on any issue.

There is no hope for any of them. Even Pat has come out of his closet way too late, and too timidly.

Mr. Hamilton wrote, “There comes a time when radical dissent needs to extend to elite individuals and institutions on a significant scale.”

If you are right — and I fear you are — then we are in a sorry state because I cannot identify ANY such radical dissent in favor of White rights and interests among the current elite. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)

I view it as a completely artificial situation indicative of systematic control of the propagation of ideas, a social condition that didn’t exist prior to the 20th century in such extreme (totalitarian) form.

Ideas are tightly policed and directed. Today, if a well-to-do person adopts certain radical ideas they may well lose their fortune (David Irving), their reputation and ability to pursue their profession (Mel Gibson), their wife and family, their freedom (Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zündel), or even their life.

The mechanisms of repression are used in ways undreamed of before—and they work.

To date, academics (ahem) and attorneys seem to have been most receptive to pro-white ideas, though not enough of them to make a difference. This despite the fact that both professions are racially discriminatory and tightly police ideas.

Andrew, thank you so much for this essay. Although I myself have never lived in the American South, I am descended from Virgina slaveholders on my father’s side, and have always had a link to the Confederacy and the ante-bellum South via my now-deceased grandparents, as they grew up when the memory of the uprising was still very fresh in everyone’s minds. I have always thought that the conventional narrative of the Civil War, which reduces everything to the slavery issue, neglected the fact that the CSA represented a lost revolutionary alternative to the way in which the United States ended up developing after 1865. I was unaware of the Emory Thomas book and will have to read it. I’ve been meaning to write something for CC about the forgotten Virginia philosopher, George Fitzhugh, who seems to have been the closest thing the Confederacy had to a “conservative revolutionary” – although I think he deserves more attention than he has received to date in our circles.

John, thanks very much for your comment. Hopefully I will extend my review of Emory Thomas’s take on the “internal revolution” in the Confederacy next week.

I recall that you mentioned in a previous CC comment you had Southern ancestry. What you say about viewing the Civil War or the Confederacy from unconventional perspectives is quite correct. Another limitation of Civil War-era history is an excessive focus on military battles.

Once a person breaks free from political correctness, the intellectual landscape becomes richly-textured and multidimensional rather than dogmatic, simplistic, and one-dimensional.

An escape from Flatland.

There are so many wide-open spaces to explore!

I look forward to anything you have to say about George Fitzhugh. He’d definitely be a tough subject for me!